Over the last two decades, Milestone have established themselves as a leading game developer of racing games. Their realistic games, such as the MotoGP™, Monster Energy Supercross, or RIDE series, are recognized for their accuracy, attention to detail, and seamless gameplay. Milestone localize their games into dozens of languages and continuously attract millions of players across the globe.

Challenges

Before adopting Gridly, Milestone used a CMS tool tailored for games to handle the text management aspect of their localization process. However, the team faced several challenges:

• Obtaining word count: The CMS lacked an option to obtain a word count, making it difficult to estimate workload and track progress.
• Cumbersome pivot localization: Managing a pivot language required maintaining two separate databases for each project.
• Poor change tracking: There was no reliable way to track updates of source content and the corresponding changes that needed to be made in target languages.
• Lack of translation memory and glossary: The absence of these features slowed down the localization process and led to inconsistencies.
• Insufficient privilege structure: The lack of options to control access to specific content limited team efficiency and was creating room for errors.
• Time-consuming uploads: Uploading translations to Milestone’s game engine was a lengthy process, hampering productivity.

Solution

After meeting at Gamescom, Milestone invited the Gridly team to showcase the product’s capabilities at a gathering held by Milestone’s parent company. Shortly after that, the localization team began extensive testing, which ultimately led to adopting the product to facilitate their localization processes.

Gridly offered several key features that transformed how Milestone managed localization:

• Word counts at a glance: The ability to see word counts instantly helped the team better manage resources and timelines.
• Dependencies: Gridly’s dependency feature allowed for seamless handling of pivot languages and greatly reduced complexity. Additionally, dependencies track changes in source text and detect whether corresponding target languages are up-to-date.
• Translation Memory and Glossaries: Embracing these features helped maintain consistency across projects and sped up the translation process.
• Granular Access Control: A thoughtful approach to view and edit privileges allowed for more precise control over who could access and modify specific content.
• Faster Translation Uploads and Conflict Management: Significantly faster uploads of translations, accompanied by issue detection and the ability to resolve them in bulk.

Milestone’s localization workflow has become much more organized. Gridly has helped them eliminate tedious tasks like importing translations and managing pivot languages, which previously consumed a significant portion of their time.

We used Gridly for over 5 projects now: our games don’t contain massive amounts of text (from 30.000 to 100.000 words per project), but the terminology must be perfect, also because most of our games are licensed titles and simulator-like. The translators must have full knowledge of the racing jargon and Gridly helps us keep track of the many terms, teams names, custom parts and so on. Additionally, Gridly allows us to have all the texts (VO scripts, subtitles, marketing texts, and documents) in one place, making our lives much easier.

Irma De Carli, Localization Manager, Milestone

Results

By switching to Gridly, Milestone achieved significant improvements in their localization workflow:

• Time savings on repetitive tasks: Automating and streamlining processes resulted in substantial time savings, allowing the team to focus on higher-value tasks.
• Seamless integration with Unreal Engine: The integration with Unreal Engine enabled efficient content transfer, further enhancing productivity. Both text and translation can be built into Milestone’s games with the click of a button.
• Leveraging additional metadata: Adding tags and labeled columns simplified tracking important information, such as localization milestones, and helped identify placeholder texts from approved content.
• Enhanced team collaboration: Adding screenshots minimized misunderstandings and reduced the need for lengthy email threads, saving time and effort.
• Reduced human errors: Locking specific columns for specific users allowed team members to work precisely where needed, significantly reducing the risk of errors.

Adopting Gridly has been a game-changer for Milestone, enabling the team to level up their content management and localization processes, achieve significant time savings, and eliminate the risk of human errors. With better change tracking, automated workflows, and seamless integration with their development tools, Milestone can focus on what they do best—creating immersive, first-rate racing games that thrill players worldwide.